Ebook: Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences

What can psychoanalysis, a psychological approach developed more than a century ago, offer us today? In a remarkably prescient series of lectures delivered in the early 1960s, the French philosopher Louis Althusser distinguishes psychoanalysis from psychology and especially psychiatry, which long resisted Freud's analytical concepts of the unconscious and overdetermination. He then applies these analytical concepts to the social and the political, integrated with Marxist theory. Althusser's enlivened methodology had a profound influence on the Frankfurt School and scholars who continue to work at the forefront of radical thought today: Judith Butler, Étienne Balibar, and Alain Badiou.

Can psychoanalysis expand our comprehension of social and political life?